


A Travelling Song

by bicycles



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s08e17 Goodbye Stranger, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-27
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 16:30:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/737756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bicycles/pseuds/bicycles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens after 8.17. *Spoilers.*</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Travelling Song

**Author's Note:**

> One-shot character sketch of what happened to Castiel after 8.17 and how he decided to pursue a relationship in spite of that. Many thanks to ~shadesofsienna on Tumblr for helping me write this. Her suggestions were golden.

The bus smelled, like all buses, a mixture of stale air and spilt coffee. There was, too, that familiar scent of sorrow and loss, which often accompanied travelers. There were fewer passengers here than on the last bus. There was the grandfather, wrapped in several layers of flannel, headed home for Passover, the soldier, who'd not yet seen the horrors of war, and the wayward teenager, the one who chewed her gum too loudly in Castiel's ear and hummed along to the latest pop music. Their presence comforted him. They reminded him, not of the past few hours, but of his Father and of his brothers he had lost. These strangers linked him to everything he had lost, and everything he needed to protect. 

The bus seats were, like all buses, uncomfortable. They were spaced too close together, and he could barely turn or stretch his legs without touching another seat, or the window, or the passengers behind him. Castiel shifted in his seat. He felt throughout his body an unfamiliar numbing sensation from having sat too long. He shifted again, stretching his long legs until they touched the seat in front of him. But the relief was minimal. He gripped the bag in his lap tighter, and collapsed back into his seat, face pressed close to the window glass. The bus passed streets, highways, forlorn truck stops. Each stop along the way seemed a reminder of fallen creation, of a world which it seemed all of Heaven and Hell had forgotten. Castiel laid his hands against the bag in his lap, against the stone tablet inside. This, he remembered, was what he needed to protect.

As the hours passed, he thought about what Meg had said. He thought about Naomi. About what she had done to him. He tried not to dwell on that moment when he'd seen Dean, lying bloodied before him, and he'd touched the tablet. He tried not to think about those images, which flooded his mind whenever he shut his eyes. He didn't need to sleep. He didn't need to shut his eyes, or to remember. He thought not of Dean, but of the future. He forced himself to keep going, to focus on fathers and daughters, on families, on the boarded up main streets of middle America. He turned to the window, to the mash-up of license plates at each bus stop, to the passengers on and off the bus. 

The sky was dark when the bus reached his station. Gripping the bag to his chest, Cas pushed through the narrow seats and out into the cool parking lot. He looked up to the sky, to heaven. But there was nothing. No moon, no stars, no reminder of what he had left behind. He lowered his gaze. Nothing remained there for him anymore. 

He began to walk. He walked through unfamiliar streets, lined with unfamiliar cars and unfamiliar houses. There were boarded up stores, reminders of the great recession, and empty parking lots. Empty factories. Empty lots. Soon the town thinned out into the darkness. The town became cornfields, soybeans, scrawny forests, but Castiel kept going. He walked, or he took the bus, or he walked. For many days, he walked and thought only of the tablet, of its protection.

He could have walked an eternity, criss-crossing the globe until there was no memory of him. He could have followed in the footsteps of Gabriel and disguised himself as a Pagan god. Each sleepless night, he stared up at the stars, or the dark clouds, and he thought that he could change. He could hide himself. But there were whispers, too many whispers on the wind. They brought back the memories, which he had worked hard to suppress. As he traveled, either on the edge of broken highways or in the back of stale buses, his thoughts turned to what he had left behind. He thought first of Meg, who had always puzzled him. He thought of how he had kissed her, and how she had called him Clarence. Had she cared for him? The idea confused Castiel. He was an angel; she was a demon. She had been a servant of his fallen brother, loyal to the very last, and yet her words nagged at Castiel. The only comfort he could find was in taking another bus, in alighting again for a distant town whose name he only knew from reading the backs of waterlogged brochures. 

He thought, too, of Sam. He thought of what the man had faced, and what he must face in the trials to come. He remembered that hopeless feeling, as he had looked at Sam, that feeling that he could not fix him.

The prayers came later. He thought he was imagining them. They were words repeated over and over. Memories. They lingered in the back of his mind, recalled what he had desperately tried to forget. Each night, as he drifted from one city to another, he began to see reminders of Dean. There, in the bus shelter at the end of the line, and there in the roadside diner where a waitress sold Castiel the last slice of pie. He saw them in the old interstate hotels, where he rented rooms and laid awake all night on the lumpy mattress, counting the holes in the ceiling. Those nights he didn't need to sleep. He thought about the past. He thought about his mission. He thought about the tablet, always close at hand in case demons stumbled upon him. 

As he turned over on his side, trench coat falling loose around him, lights flashing against the dirty windows, he thought _Had he been summoned by God, or was this another test of his faith?_ But no answers came. He hadn't expected them to.

All he had now were memories, the tablet, and the prayers. They were an anchor to his past. He had tried, repeatedly, to ignore the attachment that he had to Dean Winchester. He knew what it meant to be attached to another man, to claim a family which was not his own. Yet, a part of him longed for such an attachment; a part of him needed to fill this seeming gap in his soul which his Father and his fallen brothers had left behind. 

Castiel needed Dean. Each night, alone on the edge of some field, overlooking God's work, he felt this as wholly as he felt the tablet at his side. As wholly as he knew his mission to his Father and to creation. He needed Dean, and so he listened. He came to anticipate these moments. Each one filled him with a sense of dread, a sense that he had yet again failed the Winchesters, and this time, Dean would close the door forever. But he never did, and that day never came. The prayers had started as a narration, of what had happened that day, of what they expected to be doing the next, and always - at the end - where they were. Castiel tried to ignore the rush that he felt at hearing those exact coordinates. He kept to his path. He kept going. 

Until one night, he didn't.

 

_Cas, where are you?_

The words drifted on the rushing wind. Barely audible. The lights on the highway flashed and disappeared.

_We need you._

He turned, excitement flooding his veins. The voice had sounded close, but as he turned, he saw only the awkwardly bent metal of the guard rail. Castiel touched it. The metal felt cool to the touch, real. There were the shards of glass and rubber pieces, the gravel that lined the edges of the interstate. He could see past the highway to fields beyond. But it was covered in darkness and empty. There were only the rows and rows of freshly plowed soil, eerie in the harsh moonlight. His heart sank. He shifted the bag onto his shoulder and started to walk again. To forget. To ignore the drift of his thoughts.

_Sam needs you._

Castiel kept walking. He suppressed the images of what he had done, of what Naomi had asked him to do. A shiver ran through him, and he clutched the tablet tighter to his chest. Weeks had passed since he'd stolen tablet, but he still had his mission. Did he not have to protect the angel tablet with his life? 

_I need you._

It was in those three words, three words spoken in such quiet desperation, that Castiel's defenses folded. 

"Dean." Before the word had left his lips, the roadside disappeared and a pay-per-hour motel appeared in its place. The impulsive action surprised even Castiel, who had, of course, initiated it. But his confusion disappeared at the sight of Dean. The man appeared exactly as Castiel remembered him. From the external look of surprise right down to the depths of his soul. He could see, too, the underlying pain and the stress, which Dean always carried these days. They seemed a little bit heavier now, and Castiel wanted to reach out - to fix whatever was bothering Dean. But he kept his hands, and his thoughts, to himself. He knew Dean well enough now not to offer unasked for assistance. 

"Cas?" 

Neither of them moved. Castiel knew already that he had appeared right in that space which Dean always described as personal. He had never understood the distinction, being a celestial being who existed on another wavelength. Yet here, underneath the half blown-out lights of a deserted motel parking lot, he thought he might understand what it meant to invade another's personal space. He thought he could stand here forever. He thought he could lose himself in those green eyes as easily as he had lost himself once in his Father's work. 

He could forget everything, and in that moment, he did. He forgot his mission. He forgot what he needed to do, or why, or how he intended to do it (for in truth, all these weeks wandering the country, he still didn't have a plan). He forgot everything, except that surprised look on Dean's face as he appeared, just a little to close to the man who had been praying to him. Praying to him for weeks about hunts, and Sam, and the trials, and himself.

"I can't take anymore lies, Cas. I can't... I just can't." 

"Dean, I'm..." In all of this, Castiel knew that he had done wrong, and what he had done wrong could not be fixed through words. He stared at Dean, for the first time uncertain as to what he should say. "I'm not certain I should be here."

"Then why did you come?" 

"I don't know. I felt I needed to be here." He tilted his head to the side, a gesture he always made when he was confused, or curious. "Dean, I'm ..."

"I know, Cas."

He was closer to Dean than he had been. One of them had moved, or they had both moved in a single fluid step, so that Dean was well within Castiel's own personal space. Words seemed caught in his throat. He swallowed each of them, each thought seeming more hopeless than the last. He wanted to be here, and yet he doubted that he should be here. She might be watching them. Anyone could be watching them.

"Dean, what did you need?"

"It's Sam."

"Is he..." Castiel's voice trailed off. He found himself pressed close to Dean. They were almost equal in height, and they seemed to meld together. Standing in that empty motel parking lot, breath caught in his throat, he thought - for that moment at least - that they could be safe here. "Dean, is he all right?" Castiel whispered, leaning his forehead against Dean's. 

"Yeah...No..." Dean's voice was low, protective, in that way that it was whenever Castiel snuck up on him. "He's ..." He didn't know who moved first, but suddenly their lips were touching, and he couldn't breathe. He could only taste Dean's tongue, pressed against his own, Dean's fingers threaded through his hair, Dean pushing into the confines of Castiel's trenchcoat until he was pressed flushed against Castiel's body. They kissed for a long time, Castiel's hands moving to Dean's waist and just holding them there, one hand still loosely wrapped in the straps of the long-since forgotten duffel bag at his side. He leaned his head against Dean's, their breathing coming low and fast.

"Dean..."

"Don't say it, Cas. Don't fucking say it. We're in this together, or not at all."

"No, Dean, that isn't." He thought back to what had happened, to where he had been. He thought back to Naomi, Meg, Crowley. All of it came to him as it had when he had first held the tablet. He had defied heaven; he had fallen for this man. From the greatest heights, he had sunk to backwater parking lots, lumpy motel mattresses, and greasy roadside burgers. And he knew. He knew suddenly why he had chosen this, and he smiled. "I need you, too, Dean." 

He didn't disappear as he always did. He wrapped his arms around Dean and held him close for what seemed a long while. The streetlamps burned low overhead, bathing them in a mellow half-light. They stood like that, together, until Dean shifted, and Castiel followed. He didn't spend the night on stale buses, or along forgotten highways. He stayed, and as he watched the brothers sleep, he knew this was his true mission. They would have to move on tomorrow. But he thought, too, that was meant to be.


End file.
